I confess: I could never really quite "get" Java. I always felt like it was pushed down everybody's throat by Sun on a wave of everybody's obsession with hating Microsoft. <i>Write once, run everywhere!</i> actually always meant <i>run NOT on Windows</i>. At my school they switched from Pascal to Java in less than 2 years after it came out. <p>But putting all this religious crap aside, and ignoring libraries for a second, I could never quite see the appeal of coding in a language of expressive power just little higher than C++ yet so severely crippled comparing to the latter. Java and Visual Basic invited ex-taxi drivers into the industry, making interviewing process very exhausting and time consuming activity. And, most importantly, Java programmers have always seemed... well... unhappy with their jobs to me. Perhaps due to Java's dominance in "boring" sector of "Enterprise wonders". ("Office Space" comes to mind)<p>And, by the way, when was the last time you saw "Loading C++" message on your cell phone? :-)<p>I guess I shouldn't have said this. I successfully managed to dodge Java ever since I graduated and that makes me a non-insider :)
For what it's worth, IDE's make java far less painful in a way an IDE could never help a dynamically typed language. <p>I used mostly python or other scripting languages before taking a primarily java-based job. At first I was fearful, but then I got a taste of what an IDE can do to Java.<p>Sure you have lots of libraries to call, and lots of mundane code to write, but the IDE is able to a) give you your options and b) autowrite the mundane code c) catch most errors before you compile thanks to tight syntax and (almost) strong typing<p>It can also save a lot of time over python which is prone to introduce program halting errors without any compile time notification. This is especially annoying if you have programs with a long runtime. <p>In the end, its just another tool in the bag.
_You know, this kind of joke seems to rile Java apologists to no end_<p>I've really never known a Java programmer to be riled by any joke. I've never known any Java "apologists" at all, though they probably exist. Oh, well. That just highlights one of the good things about using Java or Windows: You are generally _not_ an unreasoning fanatic. Try criticizing ANY OBSCURE LANGUAGE...THEN you will rile people:<p><a href="http://programming.reddit.com/info/1vo0v/comments/c1volq" rel="nofollow">http://programming.reddit.com/info/1vo0v/comments/c1volq</a><p>Look at those downmods. I point out something perfectly true (ie, that unpopular language fans typically overrepresent the importance of minutiae) and get downmodded into oblivion.
Java has harmed Unix but helped Windows win<p><a href="http://juwo.blogspot.com/2006/11/flatface-musings-java-has-harmed-unix.html" rel="nofollow">http://juwo.blogspot.com/2006/11/flatface-musings-java-has-harmed-unix.html</a>